Corps values: Giving peace a second chance

Leaving Mineola and finding himself in a village 4,000 feet up in the mountains of Colombia was not the true culture shock for Paul Arfin. Nor was having a horse for transportation or washing his clothes by beating them on rocks.

“I’d developed a world view which most volunteers came back with,” Arfin, 68, said in his home in Hauppauge, remembering his American re-entry in the mid-1960s. “Coming home we saw the United States as part of the world of nations and not as God’s answer on earth.”

According to latest statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor, volunteerism rates were flat from 2007 to 2008. But that could change. President Obama signed a landmark public service bill in April boosting resources for AmeriCorps service programs and proposing a nine percent increase in Peace Corps funding.

Reflecting on his own drive to volunteer, Arfin described himself as a “lost soul,” majoring in business at Adelphi. “All my fraternity brothers were going to be CPAs and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do,” Arfin said. “I decided to buy some time.”

He got a degree in business, signed on as a volunteer and found his life’s path as commitment to public service.

“I was from a conservative, middle-class family but I abandoned my parents’ dreams and changed my life,” Arfin said.

Arthur and Lyn Dobrin had the same reverse culture shock in 1967 when they returned after two years in Kenya. “We couldn’t believe how rich we are in America,” Arthur said, sitting in the couple’s comfortable Westbury living room, which doubles as a gallery of striking East African sculpture.

“In Kenya we’d recognize someone in the distance by their shirt,” Lyn added. Most of their Kenyan friends had only two shirts, one for the week and one for Sunday.

Other Long Islanders who served in the Peace Corps relate the same experience; first understanding their home country only by being immersed in another, poorer nation. But more importantly, a majority of the 1,200 Long Islanders who have served in the Peace Corps since 1961 have acted on their newfound knowledge, dedicating themselves to volunteerism and public service once they returned stateside.

Arfin has been executive director of nonprofits and heads his own company, “Intergenerational Strategies,” which works to stem the American trend toward age segregation in housing and employment.

The Dobrins have spent their post-Peace Corps lives as educators, writers and volunteers to help people down on their luck here and abroad. Cutchogue’s Jennifer Monahan, an architect, built classrooms in Kenya in the mid-1980s. Because of her experience there she prefers working for municipalities rather than private commissions, such as improving the infrastructure of New York’s Central Park, she said.

But it’s not just a boomer idea. The graying vets of the Peace Corps are being replaced by fresh blood, responding to President Obama’s call for public service. More than 25,000 Internet applications for the Peace Corps have flooded in so far this year. Dubbed the “Obama effect,” the applications are up 40 percent over last year.

Altruistic, yes, but volunteering defers the duty of finding work in a plummeting job market, just as many volunteers from the 1960s responded to President Kennedy’s appeal as an idealistic commitment but also as a way of avoiding the draft.

Frederick Eisenbud, who heads his own Commack law firm, applied for a position in the Peace Corps in the late 1960s “to cut a class,” he said. The 22-year-old Eisenbud also saw an advantage of going to Liberia rather than a war in Southeast Asia he didn’t support.

In Liberia he taught fifth and sixth grade. “There were no books, so I had to write them,” he said. “And I taught preschoolers to speak English with a New York accent.”

Once home he realized the experience had matured him. He went to law school. “Experiences in Liberia made me focus on public service,” Eisenbud said. He worked for the U.S. Justice Department before hanging out his own shingle here to concentrate on environmental law.

In mid-August Stefanie Fabrico, 24, will be in Guatemala as a Peace Corps volunteer, one of 55 Long Islanders currently serving.

“When I graduated college I thought I had to go more of a traditional route, get on my feet, make some money,” said Fabrico, who grew up in Mineola and went to George Washington University. “But there was something always itching at me – public service.”

After working for a while in public relations in New York City, Fabrico enrolled in a “Masters International” program. Two years working in Guatemala in community development will count as credit for a master’s she’s seeking in public administration.

“I want to make a difference,” she said, adding she was inspired by President Obama.

“It’s wonderful to know that the president understands and supports this work and how important it is to go to a different culture and create understanding,” Fabrico said.

Once in the Peace Corps it seems to be a lifelong commitment, many returned volunteers said. One program, the Returned Peace Corps Volunteers of Long Island – a 200-strong organization – participated for the sixth year in a row is called “Pedals for Progress.” This effort takes unwanted bicycles and ships them to 22 developing nations around the world, providing transportation for poor families.

But individually, the returned volunteers kept their commitment to public service.

The Dobrins made a life for themselves at home by writing and teaching. Lyn’s the co-author of an anthology of African folktales for young readers, first published in 1967 and in print ever since. She also has her own public relations firm, getting the word out about Pedals for Progress and Adelphi’s Breast Cancer Hotline.

Arthur, the author of more than 20 books, is a retired leader of the Ethical Humanist Society of Long Island and currently teaches ethics and African literature at Hofstra. But the couple hasn’t forgotten Kenya. They’ve raised more than $70,000 to help support a school in the village where they once worked 40 years ago.

Arfin is part of a movement agitating to let the president know that a nine percent raise in Peace Corps funding is not enough.

The defining moment of his young life is still with him. “We have to improve America’s image,” he said. “We have to go into remote areas without guns or a political agenda and help people build schools, homes, roads and water systems. We have to help.”

2 comments

By simply being a part of other’s cultures and showing respect for it we change the way people worldwide react to change this a slow growing process taking place over many generations and creating a better world. I have served in Ethiopia 1968-1970 Teaching Nursing School and working at The Lidetta maternal Child clinic where i delivered babies, what a wonderful way to add to the world and to this day maintain my eyhiopian family and take pleasure intheir advances forward in Nursing and Physical therapy and the head of Women With Disabilities organization of Ethiopia as it starts up chapters throughout the African Continent.